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The Front Row: Rushdie and Mehta on ‘Midnight’s Children’

Deepa Mehta, left, and Salman Rushdie, right, posed for a photograph at the “Midnight’s Children” premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, Canada, Sept.9.

Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel ‘Midnight’s Children,’ tells the story of modern India through the life of a man born the day his country became independent from British rule.

Many thought of it as unfilmable, but not Deepa Mehta, whose adaptation of the novel for the silver screen is set for worldwide release on Nov. 2. It’s uncertain, however, whether it will be screened in India, as the film is yet to find a distributor here.

Here is a transcript of Anupama Chopra’s conversation with Ms. Mehta and Mr. Rushdie, who wrote the film’s screenplay and is its narrating voice, for “The Front Row.”

Anupama: When Midnight’s Children was first published, some said that you gave a voice to the continent. Where did you find the courage to take a book this sprawling, this magical and this loved and say: “I’m going to make this movie?”

Deepa Mehta: I didn’t think too much because I would have definitely been paralyzed by fear. I would have said, “I can’t do this” and “Maybe I should have and I didn’t.” There is this wonderful analogy which I always think of: In “Indiana Jones,” where Harrison Ford takes this leap into the chasm. That’s what it was really. I love the book. Everything in it has spoken to me since I read it and I just embraced it.

Anupama: Salman was it a leap of faith for you too? Was it hard to take your own material and be brutal with it and say, ‘This is going?’

Salman Rushdie: I thought it was worth a try. It was obviously going to be tough because of the difference of length between a feature film and a novel. We tried all kinds of ideas. At one point we thought we might try and make two films part one and part two just to give us more time. But there was no way of financing that, so it was one film or nothing. And it concentrates the minds if you really have to think, “How do I tell the story in two and a quarter hours?” But in the end I quite enjoyed this business of writing the screenplay and I liked the way it ended up.

Anupama: Deepa is it true that when you finished the film you had this anxiety attack and you sent Salman a text that said “I think it’s crap” and he sent a text back saying “Every time I finish a book I think it’s crap but sometimes it isn’t.”

Deepa: Not scared. It’s wanting somebody who has the same kind of investment in a project that you have, to feel warmth towards it. There was no fear at all, but there was definitely a desire that he liked it.

Anupama: Is that a reaction that you normally have or it’s just for this film. Did the ghost of Mr. Rushdie hover while you made the film?

Deepa: Never. It was wonderful because a week until the filming he said, “Listen Deepa just do whatever you want to and there’s only one director”. He just stepped back.

Anupama: Are you hopeful that Indians in India will see this?

Deepa: We’d love it. Salman has said that the book has been his love letter to India and to a large degree the film also reflects that. It seems so crazy that for some political crazy reason that a film is not accessible to the people of the country that it was made for.

Salman: Also the book has been freely available around India over time and been there for 31 years so why not the movie?

Anupama: Both of you had such successful careers and such tumultuous battle with dissenters, do these make you stronger or do they exhaust you now?

Salman: I try not to think about it too much. I mean it’s really tiresome and tiring and has nothing in doing with the business of doing your work. So I’ve to put it over there in the corner and get on with your day. That was the technique that I made in my head from all the time with the attack on “The Satanic Verses.” That’s what I’ve done ever since.

Deepa: Yes. I find that I’ve got to a point where I find it really boring. I’ve also had to train myself. It bores me so it doesn’t need me to be engaged in it. So it’s not about the film. It’s not about the work at all. It’s an irritant.

Anupama: I spoke to Ang Lee recently and he said that being an outsider always gives you better perspective. Do you think as Indian artists living outside of India , you see things about the country more clearly?

Deepa: I don’t know if I see it more clearly. I definitely think it’s a different perspective. For the longest time even the thought of myself as being outside India was anathema to me because I never really left India emotionally. But since the “Water” debacle, it’s given me a distance which I really like and it’s looking at it differently. It’s not looking at it in a better way or a worse way. It’s just that my vision got shifted a bit and I like that shift in vision. I feel it’s a true representation of myself as the way I am .

Anupama: And for you, Salman?

Salman: Around the time when I was writing “Midnight’s Children” I had this idea that this writing while living outside gave one a stereoscopic vision- both inside and outside. Certainly I didn’t think of my writing as being foreign to India and I’d have hated it if people would have thought that about it. So I do think you get this double perspective and I think in one my books, I think “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” one of the characters says that the people who see the true picture are the ones that step out of the frame. I think perhaps that’s true.

Anupama: Is it true Deepa, that you gave up smoking to make this film?

Deepa: I absolutely gave up smoking. I joined a gym. I got a personal trainer and my life has changed. Salman likes to think that he saved my life (laughs).

Salman: I saved her life. I made her fit and I saved her from cancer.

Watch the one hour special of “The Front Row with Anupama Chopra” on the Toronto International film festival tonight at 8:00 p.m. on Star World. The show includes conversations with Robert Redford, Jackie Chan, Emily Blunt, Salman Rushdie, Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta. For more details on the show, visit www.thefrontrow.starworld.in. You can follow the show or Ms. Chopra on Twitter @thefrontrow2012 and @anupamachopra.